


Lights will guide you home

by Yuu_chi



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Break Up, Getting Back Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Unspecific Cabeswater link
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 09:50:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4133037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yuu_chi/pseuds/Yuu_chi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're too young and too stupid to understand what it means to be forever; but little by little they get there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lights will guide you home

Falling in love with Ronan is a dangerous thing; fast, unpredictable and completely all consuming.

Adam is nineteen when he realizes; a year too late to do anything about it. He looks up one day with car grease on his hands to see Ronan napping in sun dappled shade, eyelashes soft on his skin and cheekbones sharp and vicious and he thinks _oh_.

For Adam, Ronan is his sea. Crashing waves that pull him up and then under, give him breath only to snatch it back and leave his lungs going cold. Ronan gives too much, too little, walks a chaotic tightrope most of the time that the rest of them can’t even see.

One day he’s going to fall and Adam is terrified that unless he’s there to be Ronan’s safety net he’ll wind up bloody and broken.

That night when they go back to St. Agnes Adam holds him tighter, kisses him longer, makes it _harder_. There’s too little air and so much breath and Ronan’s eyes are so, so blue as he looks down at Adam like right then and there Adam is his entire world.

Adam digs his nails into Ronan’s back deep enough to draw blood.

.

When they’re twenty they break-up.

It’s horrible and devastating and there’s so much shouting and Adam puts his fist through one of the Barns’ windows and Ronan looks at him like he can no longer tell who he is.

Adam drives to Fox way with blood on his hands, fingers sliding along the slick wheel with every sharp, squealing turn he gives the car. Half way there his stereo starts playing for the first time in six months, and of course it’s Ronan’s stupid mixtape.

He’s so busy trying to jam the eject button for the tape that he doesn’t realize he’s going off road until he crashes into the tree.

As far as car crashes go, it’s nothing spectacular. The hood crumples and his head hits the wheel hard enough to cut his brow, but that’s about it. Nothing Adam can’t recover from, nothing he can’t spend three or four months’ worth of his rent trying to repair.

Still, he realizes he’s crying, hunched over in his bent driver’s seat with stiff fingers on his steering wheel and _the fucking mixtape still playing despite it all_.

They’re angry tears, frustrated tears, and the hand Adam put through the glass earlier is stinging like a goddamn bitch.

“ _Shit_ ,” he hisses under his breath, slamming his bloody hand against the wheel. Then again, louder this time, more venomous: “ _Shit!_ ”

There’s too much anger in him for one body and it terrifies him. It makes him think of his father, of the way his fists felt on his skin and the sounds his mother made when she collapsed to the floor. Adam doesn’t want to become that, hates his father just as much as he loves him, but tonight when he’d looked at Ronan he’d understood him just that little more.

Adam would never hurt Ronan like his father hurt him – couldn’t even _think_ of it without feeling sick to his gut – but his hands are shaky anyway and his own blood is going cool on his skin and right then and there he feels like their relationship had been as doomed and inevitable as this goddamn car crash.

He wretches the door open and stumbles out of the car, staggering forward on shock weakened legs. From the outside the crash looks worse than it felt, and there’s a hazy feeling in his head that makes him think he might have a concussion.

Somewhere out beyond the pain in his mind there’s a whisper like leaves and Adam pushes it away.

He walks to Fox way and Blue takes one look at him and bundles him inside, hands soft and lips tender on his forehead and Adam guiltily wishes that he fell in love with her instead even though he knows that the both of them deserve better than that.

She doesn’t make him go to the hospital because they both know he can’t afford it and she doesn’t even suggest that he calls Ronan or Gansey.

Adam takes their couch that night, but he doesn’t sleep and he doesn’t dream.

His phone rings once with Ronan’s name.

Adam doesn’t pick it up.

.

For six months Adam’s life is miserable.

He and Ronan put three months of needless energy into avoiding each other before they both realize it’s pointless when they share all of their friends and give it up. They revert to “Lynch” and “Parrish” and there’s a pain in Gansey’s eyes when he looks at them that matches the one in Adam’s heart.

_It’s better this way,_ he tells himself and Adam has always been a very good liar.

Adam goes back to school halfway across the country.

He idly wonders if Ronan is going to get Cabeswater in the divorce, but his orders still come and the tarot still works for him so he supposes they’re getting joint custody after all. He’s disgustingly relieved; not just because being the Magician is all he has going for him these days, but because it’s the last tangible tie he has to Ronan that their break-up can’t touch.

Not long after he comes back to school, the dreams start. They’re memories of hands and lips and warm skin, long lashes, a grin that could cut through anything for the sheer sharpness of it. He dreams of Ronan’s fingers tracing along his spine, teeth nipping at his throat, breathy gasps in his ears and fingers tucked beneath his head as he whispered his name; not _Parrish_ but _Adam._

He wakes up hard or miserable and, on the worst nights, both.

They could be natural dreams, Adam knows, but they could also be Cabeswater messing with his head, giving him what it thinks Adam wants.

One day Adam drifts off in class to the feeling of Ronan’s fingers in his hair and when he wakes up he’s spitting mad. “Stop it,” he hisses at his water bottle even though it’s the poorest excuse for a scrying pool he’s ever used, “just stop it.”

(the classmate sitting next to him gives him a strange look and a wide berth after that, but Adam barely notices.)

The dreams don’t stop. In fact, they get worse.

Adam can barely close his eyes without feeling like Ronan is there with him, can’t sleep at night without replaying in hazy detail every single time they’d touched; casual hand brushes, arms around his shoulders, bare chests together, naked and groaning, the feeling of closer, closer, _closer –_

He stops sleeping; it’s not hard, really. He’s got an entire lifetime of being exhausted to draw experience from.

His grades suffer from it; he falls from first to second, from second to third. His professors pull him aside for “words” and the scarce few friends he has stare at him like they’re expecting an explosion any moment.

Nobody asks him if he’s alright.

_I miss Blue_ , he thinks on day three of his self-enforced insomnia; _I miss Noah. I miss Gansey._

_I miss Persephone._

_I miss Ronan_.

He remembers what it was like to be eighteen and feel so in love with everybody. He misses that, too. Now he feels so lonely that it aches and there’s the phantom feeling of glass shattering under his knuckles every time he looks at the twisty scar edging along the back of his palm.

He did this to himself, he knows.

It doesn’t stop it hurting.

.

Adam lasts a week without sleep in the end. He probably could have stretched it out longer, even, if Cabeswater hadn’t interfered.

(also his fault, he knows; he’s been neglecting it lately, not just because tending to the ley line means going back to Henrietta, but because he’s just too tired.)

The gist of it is he gets hit with a vision just as he’s climbing up some stairs on the way to his political science class. It’s the stairs, really, that do it. His legs go to jelly and everything pitches violently back and forth as he’s pulled in that space between his body and the forest, and by the time Cabeswater lets him go he’s already falling.

Thankfully, he passes out before he hits the ground.

That at least is a feeling he’s more than familiar with.

He doesn’t dream and when he opens his eyes it’s to see Ronan hunched over his bed, eyes almost as dark as Adam’s and his fingers tight and clammy where they clutch his hand.

_You’re still asleep_ , he tells himself because Ronan looks as positively wretched as Adam feels and he knows that’s just wishful thinking on his part. He flexes his fingers a little bit, but the skin against his feels real and warm and Ronan nearly cracks his neck in his hurry to look up.

“Adam,” he says, and it rasps out like sandpaper.

If this is a dream, just Cabeswater playing with his mind again, then it’s the cruelest dream Adam’s ever had.

“Ronan,” he says back, and it’s a little garbled like his mouth is full of cotton. “Where…?”

Ronan licks his lips, tightens his grip unselfconsciously on Adam’s hand. “The hospital. When was the last time you ate?”

Adam thinks. He can’t remember. He shrugs.

“The last time you drank?”

He shrugs again.

There’s a pause, longer this time, and Ronan almost whispers: “The last time you _slept_?”

Adam looks at Ronan and realizes that he doesn’t just look exhausted, he _is_ exhausted. His eyes are black and there’s stubble on his chin and lips are raw and bloody from gnawing at them. He’s the most unkempt Adam has ever seen him, and Adam has seen that boy through a _lot_.

“How about you?” He asks instead and the force he tries to put into those words makes his chest hurt. “What are you even doing here? Who called you?”

Ronan scowls at him and it’s like he’s seeing him at sixteen all over again. “Nobody called me.”

Adam frowns. “How did you –?”

The hand on his is bone crushingly tight. “I _felt_ you.” Ronan closes his eyes. “I can always feel you, Adam. When you’re awake; when you’re asleep. When _I’m_ awake or asleep.” His breath hitches. “ _Always_.”

Adam’s head feels heavy like concrete and he can’t make himself move, just looks up at Ronan with the dark cut of his figure against the white of the hospital and wonders what this means. For him, for them, for all of it.

“You told me you couldn’t do this,” Adam says, and the words come out without thought, unstoppable. “Couldn’t be with me because,” and here he pauses, swallows a little because the memories are nasty and unpleasant, and it’s been so long and it feels so stupid now, but not in a good way, in a painful way, in a way that Adam doesn’t want to remember. “That you couldn’t be with me because you couldn’t see a future for us.”

Ronan’s eyes open like lightening. “That’s not what I said,” he hisses.

Despite everything, Adam feels himself rising to the tone in his words, voice hot as he says, “Yes, you did.”

“No, you fucking moron. I said _you_ couldn’t see a future for us.”

Adam’s mind goes blank. He looks at Ronan like he’s seeing him for the first time, tries to replay that night over and over in his head but all he can remember is splitting pain and anger like a hot white axe cutting through him. “What?”

Ronan drops his hand, and rubs at his temples with the heels of his palms. “I would never have held you back, you know that right? You just…” he makes a frustrated, impatient sound. “I wasn’t going to ask you to _stay,_ all I wanted to know was that you’d _come back_. If not to Henrietta or the Barns, at least to _me_.”

“You never said,” Adam breathes. “That you were thinking like that.”

Ronan looks at him again, and Adam can _feel_ it – the anger and worry and _want_ all just rolling off him in waves. It’s like being punched in the gut and he can’t breathe for it all.

“I never said,” Ronan says carefully, “because you never wanted to know. You weren’t looking for something permanent with me; not then. I couldn’t – can’t – do that. You know that. You’ve always known that.”

And Adam, well, he can’t think of a single thing to say back because Ronan isn’t wrong.

Adam had always wanted so much, fought to have it, planned a future for himself long before Ronan had come into the picture. He’d never stopped to think about how that must have felt for Ronan; stepping into Adam’s life to see everything had already been built up and that there were no empty spaces for him to take.

He feels sick, selfish, absolutely miserable.

With Ronan it’s always all or nothing; he can’t possibly do anything halfway.

“I’m sorry,” Adam croaks, and he’s choking up and it’s annoying and embarrassing, but he’s tired and Ronan is so near and he wants him so much and deserves him so little. He sucks in a deep, rattling breath and raises his shaking hands to grind against his eyes. “God, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t,” Ronan says, and he reaches out to pull Adam’s hands away, leans forward to wipe the hot corners of his eyes with his own sleeve. “Don’t do that.”

Adam shakes his head and reaches for Ronan, snagging the leather of his jacket. “Fuck, this is so stupid. I want you, I miss you, and I’m not – I don’t – can we fix this?” His heart is beating up in his throat and he looks into Ronan’s eyes. “Are we fixable?”

There’s silence for a moment, just Adam’s tear-heavy breathing and the outside hospital noises around them, and then Ronan is pulling backwards, breaking Adam’s grip on him, and Adam feels something cold and icy in his stomach until he realizes that Ronan is just taking off his jacket, shaking it out onto the chair behind him and kicking off his boots.

Adam only has a moment to realize what’s going on as Ronan climbs into bed beside him.

It’s cramped and awkward; Adam is too skinny and Ronan too sharp for a hospital cot meant for one, but they’ve spent so many nights curled up together in St. Agnes and they know how to make it work. Adam’s hand finds Ronan’s like a magnet, head to the crook of his shoulder and Ronan’s hands skidding up his shirt to fold up around his back.

It’s the closest Adam had been to anybody in months; the closest he’s been to Ronan in half a year.

He breathes him in and Ronan smells the same as he always has. It’s nearly enough to make Adam want to cry for real.

“I’ve been dreaming of you,” he mutters against Ronan’s skin. “Every night for months. I couldn’t close my eyes without thinking of you.” He huffs out a dry laugh. “It was driving me crazy. I couldn’t function.”

Ronan is stiff beside him. “That’s why you stopped sleeping?”

Adam nods, hesitates. “They felt real. I couldn’t tell if it was me or Cabeswater. Or both. I…” he trails off for a moment, gathers what little courage he has left in him at the moment. “I was being reminded of what I’d lost every time I even blinked. I couldn’t deal with that anymore.”

Ronan’s arms around him shift, pulling him tighter, and there’s so much skin on skin at this point that if Adam wasn’t halfway to hell exhausted he’d be trying to milk this for all its worth. It feels nice though; like coming home.

_Oh_ , he thinks again as he stares at the white of Ronan’s skin.

“Those weren’t your dreams,” Ronan whispers against his hair, “they were _mine_.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title clearly from "Fix You" by Coldplay
> 
> [Update: Podfic by Rhea314 available here!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6367732)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Lights will guide you home by Yuu_chi [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6367732) by [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




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